Michael Wiener’s Travel Story May Not Add Up

It’s not too much of a stretch to say Michael Wiener is an odd duck.

He passionately collects license plates, he has almost no internal censor when it comes to telling lewd jokes and his hair is so peculiar that for a short time a prankster gave it its own Twitter account where it mostly tweeted about other people’s hair.

Last year, when I wrote a column comparing the sexual innuendo problems of our local Wiener to the sexting photos of New York’s Anthony Weiner, our Wiener called me up and chewed me out for a good 30-45 minutes, then complimented me on being a good listener.

Wiener, of course, has bigger problems now. He’s standing his ground as calls come from all corners that he resign his seat on the Bernalillo County Commission over his visit to a sex-trade district in the Philippines, captured in a photo of him smiling like a very happy camper surrounded by bar girls.

It looks like his re-election bid in the primary election a month from now will be as much about his vacation photos as about his record of constituent service.

Is it fair?

Wiener doesn’t think so. In a statement saying he wouldn’t resign, he blamed a “lynch mob” mentality and the news media’s rush to judgment for the pickle he finds himself in. “While I may have exercised poor judgment while on vacation,” he said, “I have broken no laws and brought no harm to anyone except for myself.”

Wiener says he was on his way to see his 12-year-old daughter (who lives with her mother in the Philippines) and had a four- to five-hour layover in Angeles City, so he went into town and walked the length of Fields Avenue, an area human rights advocates characterize as the second-busiest sex-tourism area in the world.

Wiener, 57, was with a young Philippine woman he identified as his girlfriend and later as his fiancee. He said he went to the sex strip because, “I was just curious.”

Fatefully, he encountered a photographer on assignment to document the Philippine sex trade for a group that supports former sex workers. The photographer says Wiener asked him to take photographs of him and local women.

The time stamp on photographer John Keatley’s first photo of Wiener, the one that shows him with four young women who were working at a Texas-themed bar, was March 7 at 6:46 a.m., Pacific Standard Time (Keatley is based in Seattle). That would be 9:46 p.m. in Angeles City, the time Keatley said he ran into Wiener.

According to the flight schedule of the Angeles City airport, there is only one flight a day to Caticlan, the city to which Wiener said he was flying to see his daughter, departing between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m.

Assuming the time stamps are correct, if Wiener was waiting for a morning flight and was out on the town at 9:45 p.m., he was in Angeles City longer than the few hours he claimed. It’s about a 15-minute cab ride from the airport to the sex district.

Wiener, in an interview aired on KOB-TV, denied he was staying in a hotel in Angeles City, but Keatley said Wiener told him he was – and talked about it in detail.

As Wiener approached Keatley to ask him to take his picture, Keatley says, Wiener asked him and his assistant where they were staying, then pointed to the new hotel on the street and said it was much better than the Holiday Inn that Keatley was in.

“He pointed right to it, and he said, ‘I’m staying right there and it’s brand-new.’ He told us all about the hotel,” Keatley told me. “He told us his hotel was much nicer, it was much more affordable and it catered to having a good time and it was in the middle of where all the fun happens.”

I asked Wiener about the apparent time discrepancy and the hotel in an email I sent to him on Tuesday and again on Wednesday. I’ve talked to him on the phone twice, the second time calling to let him know the questions were in an email. He has not responded but hasn’t said he won’t.

Although prostitution is illegal in the Philippines, Angeles City is known on sex tourism websites as a “supermarket of sex” where men from around the world go to pay to have sex with Asian women. It is known for its “go-go” bars, where women dance and men may have a lap dance or a sexual encounter in a back room or pay a “bar fine” and leave with her – to walk around town, bar-hop or check into a hotel.

A group in Angeles City that helps women leave the bar trade estimates that 12,000 women work in 300 bars in the city. It says a bar fine, or the rental of a woman for sex, costs about $20.

Keatley told me a little bit about what he saw on Fields Avenue. The place was crawling with middle-aged white men escorting young Asian women, he said, and taking them in and out of hotels. He was approached by dozens of vendors selling Cialis. He watched an elderly man pick up an 8-year-old girl selling flowers and asking how much she cost.

Keatley is careful to say he has no knowledge of what Wiener was doing in Angeles City. And let’s be clear: Because someone is standing outside a whorehouse, it doesn’t mean he’s paid for a hooker. To assume that is unfair.

But to ask questions about it is fair. Wiener chose to put himself in a gross and debasing place that exists for the purpose of illegal activity.

The most innocent explanation of Wiener’s holiday in Angeles City is that he happily visited a place where women and girls are exploited to sexually service strangers. I’ll agree with him that he exercised poor judgment.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal